Good call - I'd appreciate the help. After I wrote this I thought of asking the prof who gave me my Baroque exam about luthier advice, since a theorbo is pretty much the closest Western equivalent I can think of to a dutar.

I'll drop an email and hopefully can find something workable. Dutars really are quite different from rubabs and many other stringed lutes from the region because they are more fragile and can be because tension tuned silk strings just don't put up as much tension as metal ones.

And really this could have been much worse - it's a glue problem, not a crack in the wood and for that I'm incredibly grateful.